It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I hope that I live up to the billing given to me by my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart). I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) for securing this important debate, and I welcome the contributions of my many hon. Friends on this important issue. His speech came through loud and clear. It was not dropped at any stage, it was not interrupted and the messaged reached me without any form of interference, electronic or otherwise.
Earlier this morning, I was reflecting with a colleague about the fact that I seem to spend my life bumping into people who tell me about their holiday experience. They appear to get 1,000 gigabits per second on their mobile phone or computer, wherever they go on holiday. My hon. Friend did not disappoint with his Canadian experience. Far be it for me to compare Canada with the UK, but we are comparing a road trip across a vast expanse of land in a country the size of America that has a population of 30 million—it is one of the least densely populated countries in the world—where land costs are low and planning is easy, with an extremely busy motorway junction in the north of England in one of the most successful economies in the world. I would say that one is perhaps comparing apples with oranges. I also sympathise with my hon. Friend’s experience on a train, but I remind him that a train is a Faraday cage and that it is difficult to get a signal. We are working with the train operating companies—which is not unlike herding cats—to get a solution for mobile on trains, because it is an important part of the mix.
I say to my hon. Friend—and, indeed, to all my hon. Friends who appear regularly in broadband debates—that I have been working on the issue for quite a long time, and I intend to work on it for many more years to come, to deliver for them the kind of connectivity that they would expect. In return, I hope that when they rise to their feet in future debates, they acknowledge some of the progress that we have made. In Brigg and Goole, for example, some 25,500 premises that would not have been able to have a broadband connection can now connect to superfast broadband should they so wish, thanks to this Government’s highly successful broadband roll-out scheme.